The Dreaded J-Word

Readers, heads up: The column you are about to read is not about running, per se. It’s about linguistics. And humor. And the media, and police crime blotters, and 1980s New York.

Ultimately, it’s about the word jogging.

Runners, as a group, have a famously tense relationship with the word jog and its derivatives. We tend to bristle when someone calls us joggers or describes our pursuit as jogging. Just hearing these words can grate. Like when someone says moist. It makes you squirm.

We struggle to define the word, lest it define us: What’s the difference between jogging and running? Is it a matter of pace? Distance? Form? I’ve seen jogging described, with absolute sincerity, as anything slower than 10-minute-per-mile pace. As if that weren’t an utterly arbitrary, meaningless figure.

Speaking of definitions, google.com traces jog’s origins all the way back to a Middle Dutch word meaning “to shake, jolt”; run, per Merriam-Webster, is probably derived from the Latin rivus, meaning “stream.” So jogging comes from a jarring and violent place; running, a calm and fluid one. Given how nonrunners—particularly the ones who report the news—use these words, that seems about right.

Here are a few things that happened to joggers across the U.S. a few months back, over a four-week period, as I was writing this column: They were “groped” (Boerne, Texas; Half Moon Bay, California). They found bodies (Prince George’s County, Maryland). Were hit by cars (Green, Ohio; Bell-brook, Ohio; Charlottesville, Virginia; Pasadena, California). Sexually assaulted (Cedar Park, Texas; Atherton, California). Approached and followed by a “suspicious man” (Temple Terrace, Florida). Robbed at knife-point (the Bronx, New York).

Over the span of a few days in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one jogger encountered a flasher and another was hit by a truck as he dashed through an intersection.

Did good things happen to people described as joggers over that same period? Yes. Did bad things happen to people described as runners? They did. Those were exceptions, though. Overwhelmingly, journalists smile on runners and reserve the J-word for the hapless, the injured, the victimized. For those in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’m hardly the first to notice this—it was 2007 when The Onion published an article titled “Nation’s Joggers Sick of Finding Dead Bodies.” Since around that time, I’ve subscribed to two Google News Alerts—one for the word jogger, one for runner. The jogger roundups read like police blotters. The runner ones, well, don’t.

This would be odd enough if the word jogger itself didn’t sound so archaic. Granted, it may not be as dated as we runners think it is—the population at large likely uses it more readily than we do. But there’s no question the word peaked long ago. Hence the scene in Anchorman, the Will Ferrell comedy set in the 1970s, in which Ron Burgundy (a news anchor!) tells his buddies that he and his girlfriend are “trying this new fad called, uh, jogging.” (“I believe it’s jogging. Or yogging. It might be a soft ‘j.’”)

It’s a seamless joke, precisely because jogging is a relic. It says “retro” just as surely as Ron’s polyester sport coats and wide ties do.

Geoff Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that when it became popular in the ‘70s, jogger described “someone who runs for fitness, perhaps not too energetically.”

“Jogging actually peaked around 1995 to 2000,” Nunberg says, “after which it’s been increasingly replaced by running, as more people got serious, I guess.” (Is Nunberg himself a runner? “No longer,” he says. I did not inquire further.)

In sum: The word jogger has largely vanished from the linguistic landscape. Except in the world of crime reporting. How come?

As someone who’s been tracking this phenomenon for years and who recently discussed it with journalists, news directors, and police department spokespeople, I have a few theories.

The “Old Habits” Theory
On the evening of April 19, 1989, a young woman out for a run was attacked and brutalized in New York City’s Central Park. The crime was so vicious, so shocking, that it gained national attention. Newspapers and TV news anchors from coast to coast were talking about the “Central Park jogger” case, as it became known.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to suggest that reporters and editors thereafter associated the word jogger with violence. It’s not often that a news event can singlehandedly change a certain word’s connotations. But a story as powerful and well-known as this one could, I think.

It may be that inertia simply took over from there. Journalists used the word jogger for crime stories because, well, journalists used the word jogger for crime stories. And they still do. Because they still do.

Use of jogger is “an old, dusty habit,” one former newspaper editor told me. “Newsrooms hate change. We thought the internet was a fad.”

The “Gift for Mimicry” Theory
Law enforcement officials, I’ve noticed, also seem to prefer jogger over runner. They issue statements using the word to reporters. Reporters read these statements and then bang out their copy, repeating the word jogger. An editor reads the copy and slaps a headline on it, including the word jogger. Hey—if that’s how the cops are referring to someone…

As far as answers go, this one is unsatisfying, as all it does is shift the question from one group of professionals to another: So why do law enforcement spokespeople use the word jogger? It may not surprise you to learn that, when I contacted a few of them, law enforcement spokes-people had no good answer for this.

The “Parallel Universe” Theory
Meaning, journalists live in a parallel universe.

Before you dismiss this theory, you should know that last fall a researcher using “cosmic microwave background” data from the Planck space telescope found, as New Scientist magazine put it, “an eerie glow that could be due to matter from a neighboring universe leaking into ours.”

Seriously.

Could such a universe, with its own laws of physics, be abutting our own? If so, could it be a place where clubs are still called discotheques and men sport mustaches unironically? Is it possible that news writers and editors in our own universe actually live in this parallel universe? And if they do, what’s their commute like?

At this stage I’m ruling nothing out.

We may never know why journalists keep using this word and in such a selective and negative way. Even they aren’t quite sure. When I asked news writers, producers, and editors about this, mostly I got a collective shrug.

Soon enough, I think, it won’t matter. As running continues to grow in popularity, I’m convinced that we’ll see jogger less and less frequently in stories and headlines.

In fact, it’s already happening.

“We tend in general to write about runners, not joggers,” said an editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “Little Rock has an official city marathon, and our running/cycling trails and bike/pedestrian-only bridges are frequent topics in our pages. It’s possible our reporters are more inclined to think of people who perambulate rapidly as runners than reporters in other places might be.”

Lead the way, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette! Here’s hoping other news outlets take this ball and, uh, perambulate rapidly with it.

Mark RemyMark Remy has been with Runner’s World since January 2007—for the first 5 ½ years as executive editor of RunnersWorld.com, and currently as a writer at large.

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